Fallout multiplayer mod brings all your mates to New Vegas

Those fiendishly minded modders are at it again, with a Fallout: New Vegas multiplayer mod on the horizon and about to enter public testing. It's held together by ductape, dreams and some great hacks, but it does just about work, letting you wander the southern wasteland on multiplayer servers and share quests with chums. It's not the Fallout 4 multiplayer mod we've dreamed of - and Bethesda likely tried their hardest to implement - but it is a step on the road in terms of seeing what works.

Contrary to what you may be thinking, this isn't designed to work with sets of dedicated servers or on LANs. It's going to be a series of MMO-style realm servers that players connect to and then can wander as they like, meeting others in the vast wastes. To begin with this will be just one, situated Europe, that invites will be given to via the sign-up form on the official site.

Project contributor Jak, posting on the official forums, explained the reasoning behind a realm method, "We like the idea of realms / large servers because of the map size in Fallout: New Vegas. We aren't looking to exploit money out of this at all, although if we find we're having issues with overpopulation we'll look expanding server counts.​" That last is in reference to the possibility of private-server microtransactions - something they never intend to do, and they won't be charging for the mod.

So, how hacky are we talking? Well, here's their first official test footage:

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Hey - a lot better than I could do, and much more than Gamebryo was ever designed to accomplish. On Reddit, Jak said that the main program is 91,041 lines of C++ to push past the engine's boundries and into the realm of multiplayer. There have been some sacrifices, like the total removal of VATS, and having to make it so opening your inventory roots you in place but makes you invulnerable, probably meaning no PvP for the forseeable future.

However, it does let you play New Vegas with other people. Quests even work, syncing progress and decisions in different areas to single players to keep a narrative working. It's going to be very easy to troll people if you want, but GMs will be in place to ban those being nasty, and the project will scale up as it gets more demand.

The first test will be in two weeks, so get your name down for it if you're interested. There's a quick FAQ thread on the official forums that goes into some more details, including what to do if you'd like to help out in a more direct way.